Human-induced climate change, with such rapid and continuing global-scale warming, is historically unprecedented and signifies that human pressures on Earth’s life-supporting natural systems now exceed the planet’s bio-geo-capacity. The risks from climate change to health and survival in populations are diverse, as are the social and political ramifications. Although attributing observed health...

Precipitation accumulations, integrated over rainfall events, can be affected by both intensity and duration of the storm event. Thus, although precipitation intensity is widely projected to increase under global warming, a clear framework for predicting accumulation changes has been lacking, despite the importance of accumulations for societal impacts. Theory for changes in the probability den...

Paleontological information was used to evaluate and compare how Rocky Mountain mammalian communities changed during past global warming events characterized by different durations (350, ;10,000–20,000, and 4 million years) and different per–100-year warming rates (1.08C, 0.18C, 0.06–0.088C, 0.0002–0.00038C per 100 years). Our goals were to determine whether biotic changes observed today are ch...

since the mid-19 th century, human activities have increased greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the earth's atmosphere that resulted in increased average temperature. the effects of rising temperature include soil degradation, loss of productivity of agricultural land, desertification, loss of biodiversity, degradation of ecosystems, reduced fresh-water resou...

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) induces climate anomalies around the globe. Atmospheric general circulation model simulations are used to investigate how ENSO-induced teleconnection patterns during boreal winter might change in response to global warming in the Pacific–North American sector. As models disagree on changes in the amplitude and spatial pattern of ENSO in response to global war...

Future global warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will depend on climate feedbacks, the effect of which is expressed by climate sensitivity, the warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 content. It is not clear how feedbacks, sensitivity, and temperature will evolve in our warming world, but past warming events may provide insight. Here we employ paleoreconstructions and new cl...